


The first rules and the last

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 'why did shae betray tyrion' is the wrong question fwiw, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:04:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: “You love him,” Bronn says to Shae one night, looking up from his third tankard of ale. “It’s a bad idea. Won’t end well.”





	The first rules and the last

**Author's Note:**

> CW: non-graphic descriptions of underage prostitution, mentions of abortion, canon-typical violence. Proceed accordingly.

_1\. Who would you like me to be?_

Don’t trust anybody. Don’t love anybody. Those are the first rules and the last.

“Good rules,” Bronn agrees as he lifts her up onto his horse. “You’re a smart one.”

She adjusts her skirts. The hem is filthy with mud and she can hardly wait to have a real bath when they reach King’s Landing. She and Bronn are a few days behind Tyrion’s party, which must be in the city by now. “Stupid whores don’t live long,” she reminds Bronn.

He chuckles. “Same for stupid sell swords. Same for unlucky sell swords too. But everybody’s luck runs out eventually.”

**

Tyrion is already prepared for her when Bronn escorts her into the Tower of the Hand: there are pitchers of wine and plates of meat, soft bread still warm from the oven, cheeses, and fruit on the table, a set of clean dresses on the bed, and, best of all, a bathtub filled with hot water. Her clothes are in a pile on the floor even before Tyrion manages to get the door closed. 

“I missed you terribly,” he says as he sponges her back.

She shivers. It feels so good to see a week’s worth of sweat and grime coming off her skin. “We saw each other three days ago,” she says.

“Still.” He pauses, and she turns her head to look at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Ah, well…” he mumbles, and for a moment, she sees his mask slip. “I thought you might have changed your mind about coming here.”

She steps out of the tub and dries herself with the towel he offers her. “Your company is spectacular, my lion. You said so yourself.” Then she crawls into his lap and kisses him.

But she understands. She’s been with men of all sorts; the handsome and the ugly and the disfigured, boys with their little wispy beards and men old enough to be her grandfather, highborn and lowborn and everyone in between, kind men and cruel men. Tyrion boasts that he is a great judge of character, but he doesn’t understand men the way Shae understands them. He doesn’t know what she sees when she looks at him: a dwarf, yes, a Lannister, yes, a wealthy man, yes, and an intelligent and witty one at that, but Shae senses that he is above all a _lonely_ man with a lonely man’s vulnerabilities and desires. These are things she can fulfill, or at least provide the illusion of fulfillment until he tires of her. In the beginning, to him, she is a whore, then she will become something else, and in the end, she will turn into a whore again. Such is the nature of this arrangement. It is fine if he wants to forget that: he is paying for the illusion, so let him have it. She will remember for both of them.  

* * *

_2\. I want to see you_

Tyrion is forever playing with her hair, stroking it idly as he reads, helping her wash it. One morning when Shae wakes she finds him still asleep, with strands of her hair wrapped around his fingers, and she has to carefully disentangle herself to get up. It is well past dawn and the morning light is already streaming through the windows. “Sleep, my lion,” she says when he gives a muffled groan.

“No,” he yawns. He stretches and sits up. “Duty calls, unfortunately. I have an errant nephew to rein in who just so happens to be the ruler of the seven kingdoms, to the detriment of us all. And a spider, and a sister who despises me, and a grandmaester who both smells like piss _and_ always looks like he just pissed himself, and—"  

“Or you could stay with me,” Shae interrupts. She brushes the tangles from her hair and watches his reflection in the mirror. “Why waste your life with these terrible people you hate?”

He is silent for a moment. “A good question. I vastly prefer your company, of course. But I _am_ the Hand of the King, and I do have certain responsibilities to the realm.”

“And I am the whore of the Hand of the King,” she teases. She reaches out to mess up his hair and he gently bats her hand away. “So do I too have a responsibility to the realm?”

“An extremely important role, yes.” He buttons up his tunic and turns to observe Shae as she dresses, watching her fondly. “All those straps and ribbons and layers,” he comments. “It seems very…complex. I don’t know how you women do it.”

Shae raises an eyebrow. “And you lace up your breeches all by yourself, my lion?”

He looks up at the ceiling and laughs. “I’ve managed so far.”

“Unlaced is better.”

“I fully agree, my lady.” Some men called her that in the past to mock her, but she knows he doesn’t mean it that way. He walks over and kisses her hand. “Tonight, I will call upon you to do a great service to the realm,” he says gravely.

“What do I care about the realm? I don’t do anything for the realm.” She lifts his head and gives him a long, lingering kiss. “I do it for you.”

**

She looks at Sansa Stark, sometimes, at this beautiful, spoiled, frightened child, and she thinks of herself at fourteen and where she had been and what she had been doing. She killed her first man when she was Sansa’s age. The younger son of some minor noble, grinning as he spread her legs apart and drew his knife. She stabbed him in the throat with the cheese fork and he stopped smiling after that. She hadn’t known how messy it would be to kill someone; how the blood would just keep gushing out of his mouth and his throat onto the white sheets and the floor. It had been a good decision to stab him there so he couldn’t scream, which was probably the only thing that saved her. She stole his money and used it to book passage for Dorne that night. From Volantis to Sunspear to Lannisport it had been the same: getting fucked, getting beaten while being fucked, smiling at the men who were fucking her, laughing at their jokes, listening as they shared their darkest secrets and cried in her lap. Whores hear more confessions than septons.

Sansa knows none of those things, and she never asks Shae about her past. The girl sits there while Shae brushes her long red hair and tells nostalgic stories of her home; of fighting with her sister and practicing embroidery with her mother and taking walks in the godswood with her little friends. She can’t go home anymore, of course. The queen won’t let her leave King’s Landing, but she so badly wants to visit Highgarden before the long summer ends—Margaery tells her they grow hundreds of varieties of roses there, can you imagine—she used to think white roses were the most elegant, until Ser Loras gave her a red rose at a tournament and she realized that red roses were far more romantic—Shae could come with her to Highgarden too; obviously her handmaiden must accompany her—oh, they would be so _happy_ there…

Shae brushes and braids Sansa’s hair and listens. She rarely needs to prompt the girl to speak. She doesn’t tell her about the year she spent in Highgarden when she was eighteen. She fucked Tyrell soldiers in the city below the castle and then played housewife to a knight until he had his skull bashed in during some tavern brawl. If there were hundreds of varieties of roses hidden behind the castle walls, she never saw them. As far as she is concerned, they might as well not exist.

**

After the wedding, they move her into the quarters next to Sansa and Tyrion’s new rooms, and once she’s been dismissed for the evening she’ll lie awake in bed and fume as she listens to them moving around next door. She rarely hears Sansa’s voice. Tyrion is certainly loud enough, however, even if she can’t make out his words. She imagines them undressing with their backs turned, Tyrion making some remark to try to amuse Sansa and the girl responding with cool politeness. It makes her furious, and she carries that fury throughout the day as she changes the linens on their bed and helps Sansa dress and empties the chamber pot and serves their meals.

Once, over yet another interminable dinner, her rage bubbles up and she smashes a plate on the floor right in front of them and they turn and stare at her, wide-eyed. “An accident,” Tyrion says smoothly. He slides out of his chair to help her pick up the pieces, giving her a little warning look that she ignores.

Later that night, when he is gone for a meeting and she is alone with Sansa, the girl reaches out and takes her hand. “It’s all right,” she says. “I know you don’t like Lord Tyrion, but he hasn’t hurt me or tried to touch me. He’s been kind to me.”

“I know,” Shae sighs. “I know.”

**

“You love him,” Bronn says to her one night, looking up from his third tankard of ale. “It’s a bad idea. Won’t end well.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” she scoffs. She crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. “I know better than that.”

He drains the rest of his ale. “Never said you were stupid. Just that you’re in love.”

**

 _You’re a whore_ , Tyrion says, as if he knows what that means. He doesn’t.

He doesn’t know how many men have called her _whore_ , breathing the word into her ear while inside her. Or how many women, gazing at her with disdain, all of them thinking _I would never be like her, I would never stoop so low._ Call her _whore_ , and erase everything else about her—forget that she has a name, and that she once had a family, and that she has her own fears and desires and needs. Forget that her dreams might be equal to his. Forget that she, too, wants so badly to live.  

He doesn’t know that she had been playing with her little brother when the debtors arrived all those years ago, two men bearing the badge of the Iron Bank flanked by four soldiers. Her mother had shoved Shae and her brother outside and shut the door, and the two of them plopped down on the dirt and squabbled over her toy boat— _hers_ , it was hers, but her brother kept insisting it was his—and some time later the door opened again and her mother stepped out, her face ashen, and she grabbed Shae by the shoulders and pushed her at the debtors, their arms already filled with everything of value that had been in the house, all of her dead father’s remaining possessions— _take her, take her_ , her mother had said. And take her they had.

He doesn’t know of the years and years of scrapes on her knees and between her thighs; the hand-shaped bruises men have left imprinted on her wrists and her waist; the bite marks on her neck and her breasts. They fade, in time, but she remembers them all. He doesn’t know of the mornings when she could barely walk because of the agony inflicted on her the night before. He doesn’t know how many whores she knows who have died from infections they received as the result of this sort of thing. He doesn’t know of the pregnancies and the taste of the disgusting concoction to bring an end to them and the blood- and sweat-stained sheets and dresses. Each time, it cost more gold than she could make in a month. It cost her in other ways, too.

 _You’re a whore_. Those are the words Tyrion has to say to her, after all this time. What else matters?

* * *

_3\. Remember?_

“He promised you his protection, I imagine,” the queen says. There are bags under her eyes and her face is drawn, but the corners of her mouth are turned up in triumph and her voice is full of contempt. “He lied. He cannot protect you from me.”

Cersei paces around the room restlessly, sipping her wine and running her long fingers along the walls and the bedframe. They did not put Shae in one of the black cells, as she thought they might, but in the quarters Tyrion had kept as the master of coin before his marriage. Even though Tyrion’s possessions are long gone and he hasn’t stayed there in months, she sometimes still imagines she can detect his scent on the pillows and sheets. Then she thinks of the guards posted outside and she remembers she broke her own rules. She let herself trust. She let herself fall in love. So here she is. She will not make that mistake again.

“I knew, after Blackwater,” Cersei continues. “I knew when I saw you in Maegor’s Holdfast with that murderous bitch. My brother must have thought it was a grand joke, putting you in her service. He must have liked you very much to bring you to King’s Landing with him. Loved you, even. He’s always been soft when it comes to his whores.” She sets her wine down on the table and steps behind Shae, gathering up her hair and jerking her head backwards. Shae stifles a gasp. “You will testify against my brother. You will tell the judges that he plotted with Sansa Stark to kill my son as revenge for the death of her traitorous family. You will share the details of your…relationship…to convince them.”

She relaxes her grip on Shae’s hair slightly and bends down to speak in her ear. “I will have his monstrous little head. But because he is a Lannister, he will have a trial first. If you do as I say, you may leave King’s Landing with your life. If not…well, I see no need to hold a trial for a whore.”

After the queen leaves, it dawns on Shae that the trial is only for _Tyrion_ , and she breathes a sigh of relief. Somehow, Sansa must have escaped this terrible city. Perhaps she is on a ship bound for Pentos or Braavos this very moment, watching the waves lap up against the hull as Westeros fades into the distance. _Good. Don’t come back._ Tyrion is a man, and Shae can testify against a man, even if she loved him once. Even if part of her still loves him. But to condemn Sansa, a scared girl with her lemon cakes and dolls and embroidery—that, she could never do. Not even to save herself.

Tyrion’s father visits too. Unlike Cersei, there is no pacing and no glee. Tywin tells her in short, clipped sentences what questions they will ask her at the trial and what her answers will be, and he makes her practice until he is satisfied. He watches her with distaste the entire time.

And something else. All men are the same.

**

By the time she steps onto the witness stand, hands clasped together to keep them from shaking, and turns her head to look at him, it is too late for the two of them. It had already been too late when the ship bound for Pentos left the harbor, the bells ringing out behind them, marking the death of the king. It had been too late when he called her a whore unfit to bear his children. It had been too late on the day of his wedding—she had placed herself at the edge of the crowd, unable to keep her hands from balling up fistfuls of her gown and twisting at the fabric as she watched Tyrion nudge Sansa to kneel. It had been too late at the Blackwater when the queen’s eyes narrowed in thought and she had looked from Shae to Sansa and back again. It had been too late when Shae realized she loved him. When he fell in love with her. When he brought her to King’s Landing, to the Tower of the Hand. When he stepped into his tent and saw her standing there for the first time. Maybe even that was too late.

**

Somewhere across the Narrow Sea, there is a house in Pentos. It stands on the highest point of the hill in the finest neighborhood, far above the dust of the streets and the clamor of the markets. It may not be the largest or most extravagant home, but it is a sight to behold. When one passes behind the gates and enters the garden, the first thing one sees are the branches of the pomegranate trees drooping under the weight of the fruit and vines with yellow trumpet-shaped flowers winding their way around the arbor and creeping up the walls. The scent of osmanthus hangs in the air, heavy and intoxicating in its sweetness. In summer, the cicadas sing so loudly and joyously that it is difficult to sleep. The sound passes through the open windows and the curtains sway in the breeze like dancing ladies. The inner walls are made of the darkest mahogany, shipped all the way from Dorne, and the red and gold tiles on the floor were painted by the greatest artisans in Myr. Silk sheets line the beds and the pillows are filled with the softest down. A dozen servants and gardeners tend to it all with care, patiently awaiting the arrival of the master and the mistress of the house. They will wait forever.


End file.
